ABSTRACT
The term race, used in reference to human categorization, has existed in the English language since at least the sixteenth century.1 The connotations and cultural meanings of race, however, have hardly remained stable since its first usages. While this study cannot attempt to cover all of the changes in the definitions of the words race and whiteness since their earliest uses in English, it is important to note some significant changes in European and American conceptions of race in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1735, Swedish botanist Carl von Linnaeus divided humans into four subspecies in his famous Systema Naturae (Tucker 9). Linnaeus’s system of classification relies on the identifying qualities of skin color, kind of civilization, and place of origin. Thus, Linnaeus’s notion of race is not solely a biologically-based one. Influenced by Linnaeus, both biologists and anthropologists in the nineteenth century attempted to develop a more “scientific” system of racial categorization. In doing so, they frequently shunned qualitative criteria such as a person’s system of beliefs in favor of what was supposed to be more easily quantifiable data such as skin color, stature, and cranial shape.
